- Title: Colombia: Security Ahead Of Presidential Inauguration
- Date: 6th August 1998
- Summary: Colombia geared up on August 6 for the inaugural ceremony of President-elect Andres Pastrana after several days of violent attacks carried out by the country's guerrilla insurgents on the country's armed forces. Pastrana takes over the presidency of a nation in political and economic crisis -- bludgeoned by a three-decade-old guerrilla war and laid low by a yawning fiscal deficit, rising poverty and unemployment at a 20-year high. Pastrana gained more than 6 million votes in the election, which produced the highest voter turnout in Colombia's history. He emerged from four years in a virtual political wilderness to reverse the defeat he suffered in his first bid for the presidency in 1994. On that occasion he narrowly lost to the Liberal Party's Samper but gained revenge by unleashing one of the most bitter political scandals in this Andean's nation's troubled memory. It was Pastrana who first made public the "narco-cassettes," secret tape recordings that exposed an alleged $6 million donation from the Cali drug mob to Samper's campaign. Pastrana's role in the scandal, together with his two-week kidnapping ordeal at the hands of the late drug kingpin Escobar in 1988, makes the new president look like a sure-fire ally for Washington in its war on drugs. Colombia is still credited with supplying 80 percent of the world's cocaine and has become a major player in the high-grade heroin market. But revealing Samper's alleged drug ties to officials in Washington has also led to his critics dubbing Pastrana a "tell-tale" or "sapo," a Spanish term that literally means "toad. " His academic record, including a stint at Harvard University, also has prompted the country's leftist rebels, with whom he has vowed to make peace, to suggest that he knows the United States and Europe, where he wife was educated, much better than his native Colombia.
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- Location: COLOMBIA BOGOTA
- Reuters ID: LDL001297ZFK3
- Aspect Ratio: 4:3
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